Really? C’mon, people! I thank you for the many unconditional wishes of good luck and support but it ain’t happenin’. Clearly, you are kinder, gentler, better people than I. Or perhaps just crazier. Yes, that’s it. You’re crazier. Because anyone who knows me, knows this:

Me + Another Baby = Hahahahahahahahaha! SnortGuffawThatsagoodone.

I’d rather pluck out every last pubic hair with a tweezer.

Other than one brief mention in a column a few weeks back, I have not written on the subject because, truth be told, I was deeply conflicted over the matter. Sure, my knee-jerk reaction was one of snorting indignation. But the increasingly bizarre story of Ms. Suleman opened an old wound for me, one with which I’ve been quickly coming to terms.

My initial and sustained anger, as I’ve come to realize, stemmed from jealousy. To be clear, I’m not jealous over her giant brood: Having a total of 14 children is tempting mental illness (having eight at once is tromping directly into straightjacket territory). It’s not the overwhelming numbers that make me green with envy. What makes me resentful, what makes my heart pulse with a dark, suppressed longing is that Suleman—however she chose to do it—got to experience pregnancy. This broke-ass woman with no moral compass got to carry and give birth to eight beautiful babies, and I didn’t even get to do it with one because—and here I’ll just come out and say it—I’m barren.

One night, in May of 2004, moments after Sam had stuck my ass with a three-inch syringe filled with the not-so-much-of-a-miracle-conception-drug Clomid, the doctor called. I was still rubbing the stinging injection site with one hand, holding the phone to my ear with the other as he told me the results of a blood test, which revealed my eggs to be cooked. They’re scrambled. Over-hard. Custardized. Were you thinking about having an omelet for breakfast?

I’d truly believed I’d made my peace with the fact that pregnancy would not be one of life’s experiences I would be checking off the list. And it’s beyond difficult to admit now, after having lambasted Suleman to anyone who would listen, that she—a woman I still consider to be a delusional, egomaniacal, self-important opportunist—had something that I didn’t. Generally speaking, I do not want what I haven’t got; it’s sort of a tenet of my personal ideology. To be inflamed with jealousy by such a person is humiliating to the seventh power.

Adoption has been my I-haven’t-missed-out-on-a-thing, self-preservation decoy. So there are no words to describe how small I felt as I began to take the proverbial hard look. But feeling microscopic upon admitting the internal volcano to myself was nothing compared to what I felt when I brought it up with my husband. To say there’s been an upheaval in our home is to say that Rush Limbaugh is looking a little ruddy and puffy lately.

The problem boils down to this: I want to have a baby.

Let me revise that: I need to have a baby. I have to have a baby. And when I finally said it out loud, when I finally spoke the words after a tearful dinner at Corvette Diner, while Ruby obliviously threw fists-full of Bazooka bubble gum in the air above us, and with The Beatles carelessly bouncing “She loves you, yah-yah-yah!” as a backdrop to the tectonic shift happening right there in the milkshake- and mustard-splattered booth—well. I was breathless as my husband simply stared at me like a mortgage-backed securities buyer watching the foreclosure sign go up in his front yard.

This unhinging desire that’s thrown the rotation of our life out of its natural orbit is the byproduct of two months’ worth of emergency marriage-counseling sessions. We’re no strangers to counseling, but I think I speak for both of us when I say we never imagined we’d be back on the couch for something like this.

We pretty quickly dismissed the idea of separating, so most of the brutal work involved Sam coming to terms with what will need to happen for us to have another child. And while it’s not lost on me that the money we’re throwing at these extremely expensive twice-weekly sessions could be saved for the IVF round we’re going to do next year, I know how badly we need to be talking about this not-exactly-minor decision.

The counselor has said Sam is “abnormal” when it comes to endurance and tolerance of stress. It’s really quite startling how much he can bend, compromise, forgive and accept. I don’t know a single other person on the planet who would put up with my mind-changing madness and emotional roller-coastering. It’s because of love and flexibility that he’s agreed to have his vasectomy reversed in late July and with the use of donor eggs we’re purchasing from a little-known organization in Zimbabwe, the Petrie dish mash-up and IVF protocol can begin by next summer.

This has not, by any means, been an easy decision, but I’ve embraced my need. I’ve finally admitted that I must experience a baby (or several—it is IVF, after all) rolling and stretching in my belly. I need to feel my breasts purpled and engorged, to have stretch marks map my body as proof of my loving gift, to retain water, have my ankles swell, to suffer indigestion, uncontrollable gas, loss of bladder control and hemorrhoids. And I can’t wait to experience nine glorious months of orgasm-filled pregnancy sex, followed by years of the little one(s) suckling at my teats. The way I see it, Nadya Suleman doesn’t have the market cornered on all of these goodies. If she can do it, so can I.

(As published on April 1 in San Diego CityBeat.)

“I tie a ribbon in a foolish way”
“The delicious fragility of this travesty”
“Where we still laugh and wish”
***********************************************************

I can’t stand the delicious fragility of this travesty one second longer.
His face was twisted and red.
I’m sorry, I said. Were you talking to me or rehearsing a line?
I looked at my mud-splattered feet instead of his eyes.
I thought of summer ending and other endings and
I rocked forward on my toes, trying to lift myself
From the spot where we still laugh and wish.
Or anyway, the place where he does still.
I’m done with it there.
I tie a ribbon in a foolish way, remember.
He’d pointed it out once
And never let me forget it.
Gravity kept me on the ground but it’s a
Vertical force so instead
I spun on my heel and walked in
A new direction
To a place where I’ll tie ribbons
However the hell I want.

*********************************************************************

“Wait!” I screamed after her, “Your hat!”

The little red-eyed tree frog yawned, blinked his third eyelids twice and stretched his sucker pads wide. He shuddered. He sighed. He looked down from his perch in the tree. He looked up from his perch in the tree. Another night in the jungle and he was hungry. And bored. And lonely! Oh, was he ever lonely. Just as he was contemplating his circumstances—another night in an endless string of them, his perpetual state of hunger, his ennui, and his loneliness—a delicate cricket leapt from the Rainforest floor below. She landed directly in front of him and they stood, the frog and the cricket, frozen in each other’s gaze. She knew she should be patient, wait for le frog to yawn and then make a quick dash for the next branch. But she, too, was lonely. She yearned for companionship. Maybe this one’s different, she thought. So she ignored her better instinct and gave into her more overwhelming urge to chirp. Chirp! Chirp! Chirpchirpchirp! Said the cricket to the frog’s pleading eyes. At this, the red-eyed tree frog let slip the great length of his narrow tongue, snatched her up and swallowed her whole. He was still hungry, still bored and still lonely. But at least he didn’t have to listen to that cricket yak all night. The wild kingdom expelled a collective sigh: Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose.

The last thing I saw was rain. Or drops of it, anyway. I mostly remember one sparkling bead shivering on the green tip of the yellow-veined magnolia leaf. Since then, it’s only been rings and splashes of the fireworks behind my eyelids and even still when I open them wide. I see no specific shapes or faces I recognize or the wink from daddy or the familiar loping gait of momma when she approaches with the salve. I’m starting to know her by smell, instead. Sometimes, if I concentrate extra hard, I swear I can make out a ghost in lace but I’ve mostly stopped trying. Instead, I dive toward this new blackness to see what’s in there, feeling like I have no tether to the periwinkle stars that engulf me. I’m floating and I’m terrified. But I’m thrilled and excited all the same.

It had only been three days since I left James and everything that we were and everything that we’d built. I had woken at the mellow sound of the Wood Drake on the water, before the sun had even contemplated lighting my side of the continent, and made myself a fresh pot of coffee. I walked through the thick cold air, naked and barefooted, to the front door carefully balancing the hot mug in one hand while grabbing a wool blanket in my other. It was draped across the wood chair by the door, right where I’d left it last spring, feeling no better than when I’d arrived. It smelled of dust but I didn’t care. I was older than the dust that day. I wrapped that musty blanket around my body and enjoyed how it scratched my shoulders. It reminded me that I was alive. I inhaled at the sight of the lake spread out in front of me, settled into my quiet seat on the front porch, and held the ceramic mug close to my lips, feeling the steam warm my nostrils. Daisy had made that mug for me on Mother’s Day years ago, a relic from that other life. I thought maybe I should feel depressed, sort of felt obligated toward it. But while I watched the morning fog curl around my unpainted toes perched on the railing, I felt the freedom I had wanted for so long.

Dear Diary,
I’m still trying to take off some of this weight, slogging along on the treadmill every other day. It’s miserable. My knees hurt. My hips ache. It’s boooooring. And only seven pounds off in the last month! But I do it. Yet clearly my efforts are for naught. This morning, as I lowered myself in to the limousine, my belly actually touched the bottom of the steering wheel. Touched it. As in MADE CONTACT. It frustrated the hell outta me and as I sat there, feeling the steering wheel press into my blubber, all I could do was think about Ding Dongs. I wanted a Ding Dong so bad that I coulda sworn I had a fire raging in the hearth of my stomach. I knew a pack of Ding Dongs was the only thing that would make me feel better after all these weeks of no sugar. So I said screw this! and drove like a guided missile straight to 7-11, even though I knew I would be late for my pick up and even though it was a challenge making the turns (what with my stomach impeding the steering capacity) and even though I knew it was the wrong thing to do.

I ended up sipping champagne and eating Ding Dongs in the back of the limo and thought, so this is how the other half lives. It’s nicer in the back seat, diary.
Trust me.

I exhaled and a cloud of white smoke blew from my mouth into her face. A few curls wound backwards and I inhaled them through my nostrils, tasting the cigar at the back of my throat. Exhaling again, I turned my head to the side and spit once toward my boot. I looked up at her again, tipped my hat back with work-weathered fingers still wound tight around my Swisher Sweet, lowered my arm back down by my side. I squinted my eyes as I glared because I wanted her to know that I was very serious this time. Very serious. I took a step closer so I could taste her breathing. I smelled her drug-store perfume and the faint wisp of sweat borne of a day bent over a hot grill. Her heavy eyelids drooped, she couldn’t help it, and I could tell she wanted this as much as I did. She put her delicate hand on the brass belt buckle my daddy gave me, just sorta rested it there. She didn’t pull me to her but she didn’t push me away neither and her heart was beating faster, I could tell. I could tell, I could practically feel it there on my belt buckle, her heart. That hand. I stepped so close that my thigh pressed up against her apron. She didn’t move, just pressed right back up against me.

Just two hours earlier, she’d been on the side of the busy highway talking to her husband on her iPhone. “My car just stopped running on the on ramp. I’m gonna be late for my meeting and I spilled coffee on my white shirt. Fuck! This day is monumentally fucked and it’s not even 8:00 yet!” Now, as she crawled frantically on her stomach through the grassy field, hair and sun and tears in her eyes, she stifled her noisy gasps for air, trying to conceal herself in the brush. She heard an airplane pass by far overhead and tasted the metallic canyon in her mouth. The damp morning earth seeped through her coffee-stained and now mud-covered shirt, and she felt the ground give just a little beneath her elbows and knees. She wished desperately that she’d waited for the damn tow truck instead of taking the stranger’s ride. But he’d seemed so nice. He was from Wisconsin, for shit sake! Who ever heard of a psychopath from Wisconsin? Then Jeffery Dahmer came to mind.

She began to breathe faster.
She crawled faster.
She whimpered.
She clawed at the ground, scolded herself for being so stupid and prayed to a God she didn’t believe in.